In this article we critically analyze whether a blockchain is indeed the appropriate technical solution for a particular application scenario. We differentiate between permissionless (e.g., Bitcoin/Ethereum) and permissioned (e.g. Hyperledger/Corda) blockchains and contrast their properties to those of a centrally managed database.

Gerard is, for him, pretty enthusiastic about the paper:

This paper is worth your time. They explain the jargon at length, and discuss many commonly-advocated blockchain use cases — it’s a useful survey of the area — even as the authors are huge Bitcoin and blockchain advocates, and somewhat more optimistic for applying blockchains than is really warranted.

Tuesday, February 13, 2018

they include The City University of New York (cuny.edu), Uncle Sam's
court information portal (uscourts.gov), Lund University (lu.se), the
UK's Student Loans Company (slc.co.uk), privacy watchdog The Information
Commissioner's Office (ico.org.uk) and the Financial Ombudsman Service
(financial-ombudsman.org.uk), plus a shedload of other .gov.uk and
.gov.au sites, UK NHS services, and other organizations across the
globe.

Monday, February 12, 2018

Arquivo.pt is the Portuguese Web Archive. It got started in 2007, and in 2010 was an early archive to support full-text search. In 2013 it suffered a hardware malfunction that took the service down and lost 17% of its content. This led to a complete re-think of the system architecture, implementation, and operations. Daniel describes this process and the encouraging results in detail. It is well worth the 20 minutes to watch it.

Daniel divides the re-think into 5 major sections:

Hardware and software architecture shifted to shared-nothing

Reinforced replication policies

Monitor the service

Quality assurance for software development

Document and test procedures

I'd agree with all these points. Many of the details correspond to things the LOCKSS Program focused on during preparation for the TRAC audit of the CLOCKSS Archive in 2014. This is especially the case for the last of Daniel's sections; the audit forced us to document our processes, which forced us to think about whether they were actually achieving their goals, which led to the discovery that in a number of cases they weren't.

Update: Scott Helme points out that I'm just part of an encouraging trend. The graph shows the top million sites from Alexa in groups of 4,000. For each group, it shows the number of sites that are HTTPS (only, I believe). It shows that the pace of sites going HTTPS-only is increasing. The effect of Chrome's naming and shaming will presumably increase the rate of adoption further in July.

Tuesday, February 6, 2018

I've been writing about storing data in DNA for the last five years, both enthusiastically about DNA's long-term prospects as a technology for storage, and pessimistically about its medium-term prospects. This time, I'd like to look at DNA storage systems as a product, and ask where their attributes might provide a fit in the storage marketplace.

As far as I know no-one has ever built a storage system using DNA as a medium, let alone sold one. Indeed, the only work I know on what such a system would actually look like is by the team from Microsoft Research and the University of Washington. Everything below the fold is somewhat informed speculation. If I've got something wrong, I hope the experts will correct me.

Thursday, January 25, 2018

Steven Johnson's Beyond The Bitcoin Bubble in the New York Times Magazine is a 9000-word explanation of how the blockchain can decentralize the Internet that appeared 5 days after my It Isn't About The Technology. Which is a good thing, because otherwise my post would have had to be much longer to address his tome. Follow me below the fold for the part I would have had to add to it.

Tuesday, January 16, 2018

Here are two more examples of the phenomenon that I've been writing about ever since Economies of Scale in Peer-to-Peer Networks more than three years ago, centralized systems built on decentralized infrastructure in ways that nullify the advantages of decentralization:

Monday, January 15, 2018

Another worthwhile initiative comes from The Internet Society, through its New York chapter. They are starting an effort to draw attention to the issues around digital presentation. Shuli Hallack has an introductory blog post entitled Preserving Our Future, One Bit at a Time. They kicked off with a meeting at Google's DC office labeled as being about "The Policy Perspective". It was keynoted by Vint Cerf with respondents Kate Zwaard and Michelle Wu. I watched the livestream. Overall, I thought that the speakers did a good job despite wandering a long way from policies, mostly in response to audience questions.

Vint will also keynote the next event, at Google's NYC office February 5th, 2017, 5:30PM – 7:30PM. It is labeled as being about "Business Models and Financial Motives" and, if that's what it ends up being about it should be very interesting and potentially useful. I hope to catch the livestream.

What is the centralization that decentralized Web advocates are reacting
against? Clearly, it is the domination of the Web by the FANG
(Facebook, Amazon, Netflix, Google) and a few other large companies such
as the cable oligopoly.

These companies came to dominate the Web for economic not technological reasons.

Yet the decentralized Web advocates persist in believing that the answer is new technologies, which suffer from the same economic problems as the existing decentralized technologies underlying the "centralized" Web we have. A decentralized technology infrastructure is necessary for a decentralized Web but it isn't sufficient. Absent an understanding of how the rest of the solution is going to work, designing the infrastructure is an academic exercise.

I agree with Herbert about the desirability of his vision, but I also agree that it is unlikely. Below the fold I summarize Herbert's vision, then go through a long explanation of why I think he's right about the low likelihood of its coming into existence.

Monday, January 8, 2018

"Nobody was supposed to take Dogecoin seriously. Back in 2013, a couple of guys created a new cryptocurrency inspired by the "doge" meme, which features a Shiba Inu dog making excited but ungrammatical declarations. ... At the start of 2017, the value of all Dogecoins in circulation was around $20 million. ... Then on Saturday the value hit $2 billion. ... "It says a lot about the state of the cryptocurrency space in general that a currency with a dog on it which hasn't released a software update in over 2 years has a $1B+ market cap," [cofounder] Palmer told Coindesk last week.

The digital preservation landscape is one of a multitude of choices that vary widely in terms of purpose, scale, cost, and complexity. Over the past year a group of collaborating organizations united in the commitment to digital preservation have come together to explore how we can better communicate with each other and assist members of the wider community as they negotiate this complicated landscape.

Friday, January 5, 2018

This hasn't been a good few months for Intel. I wrote in November about the vulnerabilities in their Management Engine. Now they, and other CPU manufacturers are facing Meltdown and Spectre, three major vulnerabilities caused by side-effects of speculative execution. The release of these vulnerabilities was rushed and the initial reaction less than adequate.

The three vulnerabilties are very serious but mitigations are in place and appear to be less costly than reports focused on the worst-case would lead you to believe. Below the fold, I look at the reaction, explain what speculative execution means, and point to the best explanation I've found of where the vulnerabilities come from and what the mitigations do.

Tuesday, January 2, 2018

Growing up in London left me with a life-long interest in the theatre (note the spelling). Although I greatly appreciate polished productions of classics, such as the Royal National Theatre's 2014 King Lear, my particular interests are: